Lenny Bruce's Death was no more untimely or uncalled-for than the unbearable and cruel attacks upon his life and livelihood by a guiltily indignant society. He tore the skin off every phony reaction in this human existence of ours.
It would be more honest and faithful if we remembered him for those traits and characteristics that ministers and rabbis usually omit from their memorial services. There are three characteristics of his that I especially want to recall: his destructiveness, his unbearable moralism and his unstinting pigheadedness.
First, his destructiveness; he was a comic who demolished our cultural icons with relentless precision. There was no taboo so forbidding, no shibboleth so sacred that it could not be exposed and cut out by his probing, surgical humor. Like a shaman, he exorcised and destroyed the demons that plagued the body of a sick society. He exposed mercilessly the ersatz ethics and hollow religiosity of all of us, and he punctured every piece of pomposity and self-righteousness. He was truly a destroyer--of sham, hypocrisy, prejudice, and all true violations of human dignity.
Second, his unbearable moralism. To the public who saw only the Bruce who was a mutation of the mass media--a man obsessed with "dirty words" and a breaker of the law--they would never understand that behind the frantic and tragic showbiz life he was a true moralist. Even his dirty-word "monologs" were a part of a crusade in semantics in which he sought to clean up the so-called "obscenities" and make them represent the beautiful things of human life, part of the joys of life that taboos and mores had made dirty and unmentionable. Back of all the humor and comedy was the evangelical preacher lashing out in honest rage at all the moral deceptions of a terribly immoral society. He backed religion up against the wall of its presuppositions and whipped it with the lash of its own confessions. No institution or individual was spared the sting of his abrasive and moralizing humor.
Finally, his pigheadedness; he was a man possessed of an innate stubbornness that refused to buckle under when his comedy became controversy. He wouldn't believe that what he said was really "obscene" and "dirty" and he endured one of the vilest and most vicious campaigns of personal harassment and persecution ever perpetrated by law-enforcement officials, not against his personal morality--in that, he was no better or worse than most of us--but against what he was saying in his acts. Finally, he was blackballed in most night clubs in this country, but he never compromised what he was doing. There is no evidence that he ever sold out to anyone or anything but perhaps his own discouragement and despair. His stubborn fight with officialdom revealed the kind of irony that has our police power protecting George Lincoln Rockwell while he mouths the greatest obscenities of the human language on a public street corner and the same police harassing Lenny Bruce in the confines of a night club while he "vulgarly" satirizes our human hypocrisies.
Of all the things that we might remember about Lenny Bruce, this ought to stand out--that he offended and exposed everyone of us in his devastating attack upon the moral conscience of America.
May God console those who loved and were loved by Lenny Bruce, may God forgive all those who participated and acquiesced in the deprivation of his livelihood while he lived, and may God grant all of us the "shalom" that comes from laughing at ourselves.
